Christian show encourages fans to sing along

Friday

To Matt Maher, it doesn't really matter how big the crowd is a Friday night's Worship Night in America show at Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena. He's played for bigger.

Maher, one of six Christian singers on the bill for the show, once sang on Copacabana Beach in Brazil before 3 million people (including the pope).

"It was literally two miles of people," Maher said in a phone interview earlier this month. "Your eyes cannot process that; you can’t see for two miles. This is not on anybody’s bucket list, nobody has this scenario planned out. For me, it defied all expectations. All I could do was really focus on singing; you don’t want to be the guy who screws up in front of the pope and 3 million people."

You might think an experience like that would give a guy a big head. Just the opposite happened, Maher said.

"That’s not a head trip, it’s not an ego trip. You end up walking away from those moments feeling incredibly small. You realize you’re insignificant, in a sense."

Chris Tomlin is the headliner for Friday's show in Jacksonville, but it's really a team effort, Maher said. Tomlin's band will play the whole show and all six performers — Tomlin, Maher, Kim Walker-Smith, Christine D'Clario, Tauren Wells and Pat Barrett — will be on the stage at the same time, taking turns doing solo songs and teaming up for others.

Fans are certainly encouraged to join in and sing along.

"Singing plays a really, really important part in the Christian tradition. Communal singing, the idea of singing with other people and somehow something transformational happens in the midst of it, that's an important part of that spiritual tradition and I think that’s one of the goals of the night, to sort of remind people of that," he said. "At this point, there’s just not a lot of places where people get together to sing and not just listen to a concert but actually participate in it."

It's a Christian show, but non-denominational. Maher said anyone is welcome, regardless of their beliefs.

"It’s possible to hold things in common with people that you don’t agree about everything with," Maher said. "It’s a simple concept but a really important one, especially in the time in which we find ourselves."

There certainly is a Christian theme running through all the songs, but Maher said the show is about music, not faith.

"It’s a great night of music and I think the gift and the beauty of seeing people singing together, it’s just good for the soul," he said. "All we see and all we hear these days is people yelling at each other. When you’re singing with somebody, you can’t yell at them."

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